Towards Effective Communication through Attention-Calling Materials: A Pragma-Semiotic Analysis of Career and Counseling Leaflets as Multimodal Texts

Abstract

Multimodal leaflets as ‘attention-grabbing materials’ are often used to convey messages to target audiences. Business organizations utilize them to market their products, services, and events. Ostensibly owing to their effectiveness and impeccability in disseminating information, they have been adopted and are popularly used by the Career and Counseling Center in a public university in Botswana to communicate with students. Given their widespread use of visual text, a pragma-semiotic analysis of a selected few was done to unearth the significance of their linguistic and visual texts and their pragmatic and social-semiotic interactions. It was envisaged that understanding the relationship, representation, and implications of the selected leaflets would reveal the extent to which they effectively disseminate information and are replete with intentional linguistic and visual elements that would attract students’ attention. Five (5) leaflets were purposively selected and analyzed through pragmatic and social-semiotic lenses to unravel their themes, implications, and effectiveness in conveying messages to students. The results have shown the pragma-semiotic implications of the leaflets by highlighting how they construct meanings in social realities.